Monday Morning Politics: Trump's 'Nothingburger' Speech on Elections

I don't know. It's the Brian Laris Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. So which blew more smoke across the United States last week? The Canadian wildfires or President Trump's Thursday night speech about election security. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the speech, according to many election and political analysts. seems to be that he still doesn't have evidence of China or anyone else preventing or flipping any votes and has lost to Joe Biden in 2020. And he didn't actually claim that they did. He could only go as far as this in this 22nd clip. Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. And reportedly that voter information came largely from publicly available lists that anyone could access. But no, he didn't even claim that China actually changed who won any state in 2020 or even that they tried. So why are the people who really care about free and fair elections and about trust in elections still worried? Well, because they fear Trump might use the smoke from Thursday night's speech, thin as it is, compared to the wildfires, to declare some kind of state of emergency as the midterm elections get closer to suppress many Americans' votes. Ari Berman has the goods on what that state of emergency might include if the president dares to go there, and also the politics that might encourage him or possibly prevent him from trying. Ari Berman does this for a living. He is Mother Joan. voting rights correspondent. Yes, they have a voting rights correspondent, if you didn't know. And he is the author of Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, published in 2016, and Minority Rule, the Right Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It, released in 2024. His new article in Mother Jay Jones, after the speech, is called Trump's primetime speech was a dud. He could still use it to interfere in the midterms. Ari, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC. Hey, Brian. Great to talk to you again. Thank you. And we'll get to the he could still interfere in the midterms part. But on the speech was a dud part. Was the China clip I played a good example of the limits of what he could claim?

Exactly. That was a great clip because it basically showed that they had no new evidence. They claimed, Trump claimed that he was going to announce really big news and there was very little news in the speech. intelligence documents that were ultimately declassified didn't show much. And to the extent that they showed anything, it was things that were taken out of context by the president. So basically what happened in... 2020 was a bunch of countries were thinking about how can we try to influence the U.S. presidential election that included Russia, China, Iran, a few others. And basically, not a lot happened to the extent that there was any interference. It probably came from Russia helping Trump. But in terms of China, they basically... bought some publicly available information, use it to study the American election system, and ultimately decided they weren't going to try to interfere in the election. And it would be very, very difficult to do so. And the reason why President Trump didn't say that votes were changed, because votes weren't changed. You couldn't make that claim. And it would also be very, very difficult for any kind of foreign entity. to actually be able to change votes. That is something that because the system is so decentralized, because voting machines in particular are offline, it would be very difficult to do the kind of whole-scale interference in election by a foreign entity that President Trump was claiming was possible. Right. And Trump invited people to go to Whitehouse.gov. and look at the documents that he was declassifying. So I went to the Wall Street Journal's article on those documents after they looked at them. I figured, you know, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal would be happy to say Trump was right about anything, but would also be fair in saying if he wasn't. And basically they cited how the documents debunked rather than supported Trump's claims in the speech. For example, on China, the journal concludes, quote, the newly released documents don't provide evidence that Chinese actors access states voter registration systems. Instead, they suggest the data was largely valuable for a political analysis and for informing future intelligence or influence efforts. Now, I'm going to keep going here, Ari and everybody, give me a minute, but I think you'll find this valuable, on the possibility that electronic voting systems, you know how Trump is always trying to go after. these electronic voting systems, he got sued by one of them, or Fox News got sued by one of them for some of the reporting on that a few years ago. So on the possibility that electronic voting systems could have been hacked and votes changed, the journal included an excerpt from the Trump released document. Again, this is what Trump wanted to go to whitehouse.gov and look at. The journal did, and they read this.

We assess that hostile actors could also manipulate systems that count or tabulate votes, such as voting machines, on a localized basis. But it probably would be difficult to coordinate a campaign to alter voting results on a wide scale. Post-election audits and paper trails. also most likely would uncover such efforts in nearly all U.S. states. Then it goes on cyber operations targeting the reporting of electronic tabulation results could delay reporting, but probably would not affect the integrity of certified results. All of that from the documents Trump released and the Wall Street Journal selected for publication. So, Ari, anyone who was awaiting some bombshell, either of actual new evidence of a rigged result or a meaningful attempt at it even in one state or another, either in the speech or the documents they then released, none of that came or did I miss something? No, and it's not surprising none of that came because the intelligence agencies already did very extensive reviews of this process. And they already concluded that there was no foreign interference in the elections. And they already went country by country by country. through this. And you can read those reports. These were reports that were done by the National Intelligence Council, which includes a whole wide range of intelligence agencies. The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department did their own analysis. They find the same thing. Remember, Brian, Trump was in charge in 2020 during the election he's talking about. So a lot of his officials were involved in these reviews. People like, for example, the new CIA director. John Ratcliffe. He was involved in this kind of review. And the intelligence agencies were pretty certain about this. And they released what they could release at the time. And the declassified information basically validated that. Now, I will say, if you. did have a legitimate concern about foreign interference in the election, which I don't believe Trump does. You would be doing the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing right now, which is systematically dismantling protections against forward and election interference because the Trump administration has laid off a third of workers. at the top cybersecurity agency within the Department of Homeland Security. They have stopped them from being able to combat foreign election interference. They have disbanded DOJ and FBI task force that work on foreign election interference. They have disbanded task force that work on foreign disinformation efforts. So they're doing the exact opposite. of what you would think someone would do if they cared about this. And my concern here is that they have systematically weakened defenses against foreign interference to make it more likely that there could be some kind of interference. And if there is, they're going to point to it and say, oh, aha, that was the fraud we were talking about, even though they have actually made it much easier for that kind of interference to take place in the future, even though, as you mentioned, the kind of thing of accessing voting machines, for example, would be very, very difficult to do. You'd basically need physical access to those machines.

And one other thing I'll add, one other irony I'll note is that Trump recently was pushing for a pardon of Tina Peters, the Colorado clerk, who was convicted specifically because she gave access to her county's voting systems to election denier types. And so Trump is basically surrounding himself with people who did the very kind of thing that he's warring against who shouldn't do in American elections. Right, and we'll get more into the heart of your article, which is the scenario of what kind of executive order and state of emergency Trump might still declare. But I want to stay on what he alleged Thursday night and why it seemed to be such a nothing burger of a speech, including when one followed up and went to the documents that they linked to right on the front page, really, of whitehouse.gov. Maybe an extra elephant in the room is that for all the doubt Trump wants to generate about the vulnerability of U.S. elections to being manipulated and what he claims with no evidence happened in 2020, he won in 2024. And he won in almost all the swing states. One could conclude that that disproves his claims unless someone was rigging all those state results for him. It hardly seems a logical basis for declaring a state of emergency. But I realize... that logic is not what we're dealing with here, as compared with trying to manufacture feelings in parts of the electorate, maybe to try to affect a result. Do they even try to explain why 2024 doesn't disprove their alleged theory of the case? Well, the White House press secretary was asked about this, and she said, well, it was too big to rig. Trump won by so much that you couldn't manipulate the votes. But of course, yeah. Biden was in charge in 2024, right? So you'd think if at any time there was going to be foreign interference, it would have been when Trump was not in the White House, right? And his Democratic opponent was. That's when you think they would try to manipulate the system to the extent that you could manipulate it. And of course, the opposite happened. And now Trump is talking, is still fixated on manipulation of an election in which he was in charge of the election process. And of course, he. said it was all the deep state who was conspiring against him. But no, I mean, they haven't really shown that. That was a point that Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, who Trump ousted in the primary made very, very clearly in recent days, he said, we were in charge of everything. We won all the elections. So why are we still talking about fraud? And I think if you watched the morning after commentary of Fox News not covering Trump speech, most Republicans not talking about Trump speech saying they were traveling or they missed it or they were doing something else. I think they would like this to just go away, to be totally honest with you. I think most Republicans would just wish Trump would stop talking about this issue. But there is obviously...

a very influential group within the Republican Party that Trump has wound up for six years. And now they have captured the party to such an extent that even if Trump wanted to stop talking about this issue, he couldn't. But of course, he doesn't want to stop talking about it to begin with. So now we get to the heart of your article, which is that despite there being very little, if anything, to what he presented Thursday night. That very fact might make it more likely that he will ultimately take drastic action to interfere in the 2026 midterms, quoting from your article. Why might that be true? Well, there has been this whole outlandish plot that has been circulated by election and IRS for the last year and a half now, claiming that there was foreign interference in the 2020 election, specifically claiming China interfered in the 2020 election, and saying that... President Trump should present the evidence of that foreign interference, then use that evidence to claim there was a national emergency. And by doing so, he would essentially circumvent the very clear language in the Constitution that says that states with oversight from Congress run elections. But by claiming some kind of emergency, you could then concentrate power in the executive branch and do things like try to ban mail voting or try to require citizenship to vote or. tried to seize voting machines, all the things that Trump talked about in his speech and has been trying to do. Now, this would certainly be tested in the courts if Trump tried this. But I do think it was notable that the first part of this plan was claiming foreign interference and declassifying the documents. And that's what Trump did. So it would follow that if they're trying to carry out this plan. This then lays the groundwork at some later date for Trump to try to claim there's some kind of national emergency. Again, I don't believe this would ultimately stand up in court, but this is the plot they are pushing. Listeners, did any of you go to whitehouse.gov and read any of those documents the president touted were now available to all. 212-433. WNYC, call our text, 212, 433-9692. Or who has a question, comment, or story about the potential for a state of emergency with executive orders, changing the voting laws, or anything they were already doing? or anything related, and we're going to get to things that Ari lists in his article, and he mentioned some of them already, that Trump is already doing without getting the headlines of a state of emergency. So, you know, we'll make sure that you're aware of some of those as we go in this conversation with Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jay Jones at 212-433. WNYC, call or text, 212, 433-96. So you report on a very specific effort, and you were just referring to it, during the last year and a half or so.

But it's the fact that people that have actual influence in Trump's orbit have been pushing this as well. Kleda Mitchell, for example, who was a former Trump lawyer who helped him try to overturn the election in Georgia. She was on that call where he famously told the Georgia Secretary of State to find 11,780 votes to overturn Biden's victory. She's been talking about this. Steve Bannon has been talking about it extensively. A lot of these people were just at the White House right before. Trump's address, you have a lot of meetings, a lot of kind of gatherings of different high-profile election and I is Michael Flynn, the ex-general is another person who have been basically saying, you know, Trump needs to do this. So I was honestly waiting in the speech for this kind of announcement. I thought that Trump is going to say because we have this. evidence, even though it's not actual evidence of foreign election interference, we have no choice but to declare this kind of national emergency. That's what I thought was coming. Now, for some reason or another, he didn't do it. Maybe he was just convinced by whoever the saner elements in his administration are that That was unconstitutional, which it probably is. Maybe he was just convinced that this is not the time to do it, that if you're going to try to take some emergency powers, do it close to the election when there's less time to challenge it. Maybe they are still trying to do this, but they felt like they needed to lay the groundwork with the speech in the first place. But for whatever reason, Trump stopped short, not just of calling a national emergency, but really saying anything in terms of what his administration would do. other than the fact that he once again called for passing the Save America Act, and then we can get into this if you want. There was a press conference the next day by the DHS secretary in which a lot of quite disturbing things were said about the voting process, but again, nothing actually tangible in terms of what the administration can do about it. Let's take a phone call from Jim and Brick, who wants to ask about one of the documents that Trump posted on the site that we haven't mentioned yet. It's a fair question. Jim, you're on WNYC with Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent from Mother Jay Jones. Hi, Jim. Yes, hi, good morning. Thank you. I firmly believe what the guest is saying, that Trump's angling to create some sort of or call for an emergency, whether warranted or not. But I can just go, what I'm calling in about was an incident in Michigan that did appear to be some skullduggery on the Democratic side, but that they will cite to magnify, I mean, despite the fact that... Trump himself asked to, as mentioned, find 11,000 votes in Georgia. There were other false electors sent that Mike Pence was supposed to validate. And there's just so much evidence on the other side. But just not to sweep it under the rug, the one thing, if the guest could either debunk or put in perspective, the Michigan episode. Fair question. Ari, can you go there?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not super familiar with what he claimed in Michigan. It seemed like there was some kind of fraudulent application submitted during a voter registration drive. It seemed like it was caught by the police and investigated at the time. It didn't seem like I'm looking at a fact check now, for example, and it says on October 16th, 2020, that a clerk in the county where it happened said that there were 42 applications that they thought were fraudulent out of 8,000 to 10,000 that were submitted. It looked like the majority of them were valid. And no one received a ballot based on the fraudulent registration. So I don't know why they were fraudulent registrations. Sometimes this happens with voter registration drives. People feel pressure to submit more forms. But of course, to get a ballot, you need more information than just being registered. So you have to prove your identity in some capacity besides just registering to vote. I think it seems to me, based on what I understand, that that was a fairly isolated case and not the kind of evidence of any kind of wide-scale plot or fraud to disrupt the election. From that same Wall Street Journal article that I was citing from before, after they looked at all these documents that Trump placed on White House.gov, including the one about Michigan, It says, and it basically backs up what you just said, it says a case in Michigan involved suspicious registration forms but not fraudulent votes. It says Trump in his speech said evidence of voter fraud in Michigan during the 2020 election was covered up. there was an investigation into suspicious registration forms and a paid canvassing operation in the state, but it wasn't about fraudulent votes being counted. State elections workers flagged numerous potentially fraudulent registration applications arriving from the same source. The local police and state agencies opened an investigation and raided a voter registration organization's offices in October shortly before the 2020 election, the potentially fraudulent application. were flagged before approval. And I think that just goes to back up this other document that was in the set that I cited. from before that the journal published that said, we assess that hostile actors could also manipulate systems that count or tabulate votes such as voting machines on a localized basis, but it probably would be difficult to coordinate a campaign to alter voting results on a wide scale. Post-election audits and paper trails also most likely would uncover such efforts in nearly all U.S. states.

unquote, from another document that Trump released. So those seem to combine Ari to say, yeah, you know, local... systems are pretty good at catching even attempts to commit registration or voter fraud, and that's exactly what happened in this case. Yeah, that's what the Michigan Secretary of State's office said about the Michigan example, was that they caught it, and there were no fraudulent votes as a result. So the system actually worked as it should, and I think that's the case in most places, that first off, you need some kind of identification to be able to register to vote you need some some kind of proof of who you are everywhere to be able to cast a ballot and then the results are confirmed in lots of different ways. In most states, when you vote, you get a paper backup to make sure your vote was recorded. Then after the results are done, those results are recounted if necessary. They're audited if necessary. And the 2020 election in particular, the one that Trump is so fixated on, that had the most scrutiny of any election in American history because of the claims. And so states went beyond. in terms of in places like Georgia, to recount three times to audit all their results. States are constantly auditing their result, their voter rolls now, for example, to make sure that ineligible people are removed, to make sure there aren't non-citizens and dent people and all the things that Trump is talking about. And so American elections are actually run pretty well. It doesn't mean that there's not vulnerabilities in elections. There certainly are vulnerabilities. That could be improved. I think that I've already said the administration is doing the opposite of trying to improve. improve them. But generally speaking, the decentralized nature of American elections makes it very hard for there to be any kind of broad conspiracy, whether foreign or domestic, that could interfere with votes across multiple states. It would be hard to do it in one county and have it be undetected, let alone have it be done in all the different counties and all the different states. We'll continue with Ari Berman in a minute, and we will get into some of the items. We'll go down the list of some of the key items in this draft 17-page executive order that would so upend how Americans vote that Ari reports these anti-election activists are urging Trump to actually impose this executive order. We're going to talk about what's in it, point by point, right after this.

Brian Lair on WNYC with Ari Berman, Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jay Jones, also author of the books, Give Us the Ballot, the Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, and Minority Rule, the right-wing attack on the will of the people in the fight to resist it, which is also about that topic. And now we're going to get into some of the particular things in the 17-page executive order draft that some people around President Trump have been urging him to actually announce as an executive order. Ari says he reported on it in March, so now we're going to take a look at some of the points. Number one, the draft order dubiously alleges that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much... longer and be far more error prone than a regular machine count. So start with Ozari. Why do those things from the point of view of their interests? Well, I mean, it's a very hilarious scheme. I just want to reiterate this, that the idea that Trump could just unilaterally tell all 50 states, these are what the voting rules are now. That is going to be immediately challenged in court. I think there's very little basis for the president to claim that, even if he's able to invoke some kind of wartime powers. But, I mean, number one, maybe... hinge on whether there was an actual emergency, if he declared a state of emergency, which is, I think, the predicate on which he would impose the new rules unilaterally. Yeah, I mean, I think that would be a big part of it, would be, is there some kind of actual emergency? And then if there was this kind of emergency, does he have the authority to actually do this? If you look at, I want to get back to your points about voting, but if you look at, for example, the basis for Trump to claim this kind of emergency, he's citing these rather obscure economic laws. These were the same laws that he cited to say that he had the power to declare tariffs. And the Supreme Court said, you don't have that power. And he declared the tariffs under actual economic provision. So the idea that he could ban mail-in voting under economic provisions that were ruled unconstitutional in a terror fight, I think is an incredible stretch. But I think, yes, he would have to show there was some kind of actual emergency. You'd believe that the speech on Thursday would undercut that because there was no actual evidence of the kind of foreign interference that he's claiming. But nonetheless, that's the idea. We've uncovered this evidence. Therefore, it gives us this power.

to have this emergency declaration. So again, I think it's very far-fetched, but nonetheless, this is what he's being urged to do. So on that first point, it would mandate all absentee ballots, well, unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans. Talk about that one. Well, it's similar to what he wants to do through the Save America Act. I mean, that similar language has been added to the Save America Act now to essentially end what we know of as no excuse absentee voting. There would be very limited reasons why you could get an absentee ballot, which would make it very difficult for most Americans to vote by mail. Trump blames mail voting for his 2020 defeat. I think his views on mail voting are unpopular, even with a lot of Republicans. Republicans use mail voting. of states too in places like Arizona, Florida, Alaska, Utah. They've used male voting in large numbers. Trump voted by mail just recently in the spring. He's voted by mail dozens of times. And so the idea that there's something inherently suspect with male voting is untrue. And the idea that it inherently benefits Democrats isn't true either. It's really only since 2020 when Democrats decided to start taking COVID more seriously than Republicans that Democrats even started using mail voting in large numbers. But nonetheless, Trump remains fix it on this point. And then. The voting machines, they've been talking about this for a long time since 2020, claiming that voting machines were somehow corrupted or manipulated to steal the election in 2020. They prevented no evidence of that. Nonetheless, they still are trying to ban certain kinds of voting machines. They want to do a hand count of ballots instead. Ironically, that would be far less secure than the voting machines. There would be a lot more error prone because you just... introduce the element of human error into it. It takes a lot longer for people to count votes than machines, and there's a much... better chance that they're going to get something wrong. I mean, Trump's been fixated, for example, in California with getting results quickly and seems to hate the idea that it takes states that have larger amounts of mail voting, for example, longer to count their votes. Well, you say that you're going to get rid of voting machines and have a humans just count ballots. Well, that's going to take a long time, too. So that would seem to undercut the things that Trump says he wants to do with the voting system writ larger. It's interesting about the paper ballots. that you're describing as less secure, because I think there's so much widespread distrust of tech in general these days for a lot of good reasons. And, you know, even the document that he put online that seems to disprove his case that there's the potential for a lot of election fraud around the country.

rests on the fact that all these places that use electronic voting machines tend to also have paper ballot backups. So it's like paper ballots is the gold standard. I think a lot of people have that in their heads, but you're saying that's not exactly right. No, I'm saying that having both is really the best system. So having a system that works quickly that can be done easily, but then have an actual paper record is the best system. But if you just moved counting ballots by hand on paper, that would take much longer than using voting machines with paper backups. be a lot more error prone because humans are just going to start making mistakes ultimately. So that's why I think we should have paper, but I don't think it should be the only way that we count ballots. And I don't believe that it should only be done by people because that ultimately is going to make the results less accurate, not more. Another one from that document related, it would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized. and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or who are out of town during the election. So I think the second part of that is in the so-called Save America Act that it would restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or out of town during the election. But the notarized part, having to get your mail-in ballot notarized, goes, I think, beyond what's in the text of that act that isn't passing Congress, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, anyone who's tried to get a notary recently understands that it's not so easy to do. And I mean, this would basically shut down mail voting. I mean, the number of people that would then be able to get their ballot notarized and then also have some kind of medical condition. I mean, you're probably talking about a handful of people that would end up voting by mail. under those kind of constraints. So yeah, I mean, it would essentially shut down mail voting and it would go beyond the way that they would try to stop mail voting in the Save America Act. And I just want to reiterate that this is something that I think a lot of Republicans would regret doing if it ever actually became law. Yeah, and it seemed to be that he couldn't remotely get away with that politically, even among Republican voters without a massive, you know, probably self-defeating political backlash. But is mail-in voting disproportionately used by Democrats still? I think this started in the pandemic when, you know, a lot of people on the right were trying to debunk that there was risk from the pandemic or to the degree that... medical experts were saying, is that the political gain to be had if they restricted it as an option? Because starting with the pandemic and to this day, Democrats are the ones more likely to stay away from in-person voting, even if they don't see, you know, a COVID risk anymore. They're like, oh, this is.

I like this. I'm getting the ballot sent right to me. I can fill it out, put it in the mailbox, whereas Republicans are more likely to go, hmm, I don't trust that. This comes out of COVID lies or however they spin it. And so that's why he's going after mail-in ballots. Yeah, I think that and the fact that you also have some of these larger Democratic-controlled states like California that vote largely by mail. I think those are the reasons why he is still so fixed on this, the 2020 loss, and then he sees it being used in other states to, in his view, rob Republicans of victories in California. Of course, he didn't mention that in California, the Republican gubernatorial candidate advanced. to the general election. So if Democrats were trying to rig the vote in California, they didn't do a very good job by allowing Steve Hilton, the Republican, to make the general election in California. But that's generally the idea. The problem is, though, that even if Democrats are using it at larger numbers, a lot of Republicans still vote. by mail. And there's a lot of core Republican constituencies, like, for example, older voters or more rural voters that still rely on mail ballots. And so if you suddenly got rid of it, yes, maybe in the short term that would hurt Democrats more, but it would also hurt a lot of Republicans. And if you look at the broad sweep of mail voting historically before 2000, Republicans had voted by mail in larger numbers than Democrats in a lot of states. So those are things he might do. You also wrote up in your Mother Jay Jones article a list of things he actually has done that maybe have not made enough news. So let's go through a few of these before we ran out of time. One, firing all the commissioners. from the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that helps state secure their elections. So probably most of our listeners have never heard of the Election Assistance Commission. What is it? Who did he fire? What difference might have made? Well, it's a federal agency that exists to basically help states run their elections. They offer guidance to states on best practices, and they do things like help states secure their voting machines. The very type of thing that if you seem to care about, for example, stopping foreign interference like Trump claimed to do, you'd want the EAC to be able to function. But evidently, he was frustrated with the commissioners there. There's... Four commissioners, two Republicans, and two Democrats. One of the Republicans had already resigned. And so what happened is he fired the two Democratic commissioners and he gave the lone Republican who remained the opportunity to resign, but there's basically no commissioners there. There still are some staff. The question is, what is he planning to do now with the EAC? Does he just want it to be weak so that they can't help states? Or is he going to try somehow to put more radical people on it?

try to coerce states, instead of helping states, try to coerce them into doing things like, for example, trying to put in place the policies from the SAVE Act at the state level if the SAVE Act doesn't pass. We don't know that. I'm expecting that's what the next phase of this is here. But it seems like he's going to try to use what is a pretty obscure... federal agency to try to ultimately achieve some of his aims with the voting process. And here's one of those possible coercion techniques that you referred to. You wrote the Department of Homeland Security threatening to cut off anti-terrorism funding to states that don't comply with Trump's voting mandates and the Postal Service considering only sending mail ballots to voters and states that hand over their voter rolls to the administration. So if they were to do that, they're not doing that. yet. If they were to do that, what are they looking for if they want states to hand over their voter rolls to the administration? Who's at risk from that? Well, what they're saying is they want to find evidence of non-citizen voting so that they can then get... states to purge their voter rolls. They've made a lot of claims about the numbers of non-citizens registered in recent days. Election officials believe those numbers are wildly inflated. They say that non-citizen registration voting is incredibly rare. For example, Utah recently audited their voter rolls, found that of two million people, only 27 non-citizens were registered to vote. Only 13 of them had cast a ballot, so it was a very small number of people. Usually by mistake, I mean, usually these are people that are green card holders, for example, they get a driver's license, they accidentally register. Very, very small percentage. You may ultimately cast a ballot, but very, very small numbers compared to the rhetoric that we hear. But nonetheless, they remain fixated on that. You heard the DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin basically say that if states don't give us this information, election officials could be criminally prosecuted. So they can't force any state to hand this over, but they can try to threaten states to hand this. over and they're they're threatening very stiff penalties not just losing money but ultimately jail time and so we'll see how it plays out as of now The Department of Justice is 015 in federal court trying to get these state voter rolls. So they've been rebuked by both Republican and Democratic appointed judges. They haven't won a single lawsuit, but they keep pushing for this. The thing I'm most disturbed about is this proposal that the Postal Service won't deliver mail ballots unless states hand over their voting roles because that to me, it's been blocked by a federal judge, but that to me seems blatantly unconstitutional. The Postal Service is supposed to deliver the mail. They're not supposed to... tell you what the rules of male voting are. They're not supposed to stop people from getting mail ballots. I think that would be a gross abuse of the Postal Service if it ever came to pass. One more call for Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jay Jones, who has an article about what kind of state of emergency or executive order Trump might try to impose despite the limited evidence of any voter fraud in the past in his Thursday night speech. Edward and Nurochelle, you're on WNYC. Hello, Edward.

Hello. It seems to me like the only party here that's trying to do something fraudulent is the president. And it seems like there should be some way for some judicial process to go into court and say that there's got to be some kind of restraint of any declaration of an emergency because it's clear what he's trying to do. And if you could have the courts sort of restrain him in advance, that would be great. The other thing might be some kind of vote in Congress where the resolution is written so that no Republican could not support it, which would say that our elections are safe and we don't need any kind of interference. Is that in any way possible? Edward, thank you. And really what he's raising with those two possible examples, which probably neither would happen, I don't know that there's a lot of judicial restraint in advance of things that we have in this country and the likelihood of Republicans in Congress signing on to a bill or a resolution that says, no, our elections are safe, you're wrong. Well, we've seen how, you know, so many Republicans who may actually believe that. line up in support of Trump's fraudulent fraud claims anyway since January 6th in that period. But so to those specifics, or more broadly, what else, Ari, if you thought about this, could be done as a matter of prevention before there has to be a court battle, maybe down to the wire of, you know, election day in November, if he tries to do this kind of stunt? Yeah, election officials have been thinking about the point that the caller raises, could they try to get some injunction ahead of time? It is hard to do that before the courts. Courts usually want to see what the evidence of harm is. And if you say, oh, well, the president's talked about this, that's usually not enough, which that leaves the... the difficulty of, okay, he does something crazy and then you have to challenge it after the fact. What I think that, though, is that both Democrats and election officials since 2020 have gotten better about this. So I do believe that they'd be ready to file litigation quickly. Secretaries of state, state attorney generals, governors, other state actors are already talking about this, preparing for this. I think election officials are already figuring out how can we secure our election systems ahead of time. But there is some element of unpredictability here, Brian. And that's one of the things that worries me is that it is hard to game plan all of this. And it is hard to war game all of it and see exactly how it would play out. There have been examples where the administration has done things like going into Fulton County, Georgia and taking 700 boxes of ballots that we thought would be illegal and unconstitutional. And at least for now, the courts have allowed them to do it. So we are in kind of uncharted territory here with some of the stuff that the administration is trying to do. We believe it's unconstitutional, but some of it may not be tested until it actually happens. And that's the kind of remade. To that point, one last text, and then we're at a time, listener writes, he doesn't need a valid legal basis or something that would actually succeed in court. He just needs to drag the process out long enough to exceed the hard statutory deadlines. We saw him try this in 2020. In other words, he could, you know,

impose this in a way that it would affect the election because the court system would run out of time before the election to overturn it. Do you agree that's a risk? Well, I think the courts would be distinctly aware of these kind of deadlines. And so they would make sure that the elections are certified. I mean, he failed in 2020 for a reason. I don't want to sit here and say that I believe that there's no chance he'll succeed in 2026 given... all the things that have occurred between 2020 and 2026. But I do think that it's going to be difficult for the administration to ultimately interfere in the election and succeed to the extent that they have tried or the extent that they are outlining how they'd want to do it. I do believe the courts would ultimately stop them and would be aware of all the deadlines they have to meet in order to be able to do so. Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jay Jones. His new article is called Trump's primetime speech was a dud. He could still use it to interfere in the midterms. Thanks for sharing all that analysis with us. Thanks a lot, Brian. Always great to talk to you. WNYC Studios is supported by Odu. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odo at ODO.com. That's ODO.com.